Blog by Nicole Leotaud, Executive Director of the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute (CANARI)
September 10, 2025
The Balthazar community undertaking riverbank restoration in Grenada in 2025. Credit: Wavel Dumont.
While international recognition of the concept of climate justice is growing, there is an urgent need to firstly understand how climate injustices are experienced by vulnerable groups in the Caribbean, and secondly to centre climate justice in the actions taken to address climate change. Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are promoted as a win-win solution delivering benefits for biodiversity and human well-being. But a more critical and deliberate approach is needed to ensure that NbS contribute to addressing climate injustices experienced by local and Indigenous communities in the Caribbean. This blog, written by Nicole Leotaud, Executive Director of the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute (CANARI), expands on ideas delivered at the Caribbean Risk Conference 2025 panel on “Are Nature-Based Solutions Keys to Building A Resilient Caribbean?”.
We all celebrated the advisory opinions by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in May 2025 and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July 2025 confirming the obligations of States to address justice and human rights concerns in responding to the urgent and existential threat of climate change. These opinions also affirm that addressing climate change must move beyond being a scientific concern and economic issue with technological solutions. Climate actions must emphasise inequities and the triple injustice facing people who have not caused climate change, yet are most impacted by and least able to respond to it. This is certainly the situation facing Caribbean SIDS, as described by written and oral statements made to the ICJ by Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Critically, this obligation also extends to the sub-national and local level, requiring us to examine:
- Who are those most vulnerable within Caribbean SIDS?
- What are the climate injustices they experience?
- How can actions to address climate change contribute to addressing these injustices?
One of the actions being promoted to build resilience to climate change and natural hazards in the Caribbean is Nature-based Solutions (NbS). NbS is an umbrella concept describing a range of actions to protect, restore, and sustainably manage ecosystems, while simultaneously providing benefits to biodiversity and human well-being. Addressing human well-being effectively means ensuring that NbS deliver climate justice to local and Indigenous communities which depend on nature for their livelihoods and well-being.
What are locally-led NbS experiences in the Caribbean?
Work by the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute (CANARI) on NbS focuses on three priorities:
- Implementing ecosystem-based approaches to building resilience to climate change and natural hazards, targeting ecosystems that are climate vulnerable and at risk of degradation
- Supporting local communities and natural resource users to lead and meaningfully engage in inclusive, participatory approaches, including local-level natural resource stewardship and community and civil society-led restoration initiatives
- Integrating local and traditional knowledge and citizen science in design, implementation and monitoring of NbS
CANARI directly supports community-led NbS initiatives through providing technical and financial support, coaching and mentoring to help communities do their own assessment of risks at the local level and to develop and implement their own strategies for resilience building. We also facilitate knowledge exchange via our online Caribbean Resilience Knowledge Platform, which currently showcases 304 civil society initiatives on Caribbean climate justice and resilience. A recent CANARI study on community-led ecosystem restoration mapped over 50 initiatives across 15 Caribbean countries which were implemented over 2014-2024. The study provides a series of recommendations for civil society, as well as funders and policy makers, to help guide locally-led Caribbean ecosystem restoration. CANARI’s work has helped us understand what climate injustices Caribbean communities experience, and how we can use NbS to contribute to addressing these injustices.
What kinds of climate injustices are experienced by Caribbean communities?
In CANARI’s work, we have seen how Caribbean local and Indigenous communities face all seven types of climate injustice which have been identified in global climate justice frameworks. For example:
- Recognitional injustice: There is inadequate recognition of communities’ human rights (for example the right to life, right to a healthy environment, right to livelihood, right to food and water, right to culture) and the impacts of climate change on them, their cultural heritage, and identity. There is also poor understanding of how intersecting identities (such as race, gender, political affiliation, level of education, and level of income) interact to amplify oppressions and vulnerabilities.
- Distributional injustice: There is unfair aid distribution for recovery from disasters (such as hurricanes), which may be driven by partisan politics and clientelism as well as other socio-economic marginalisations.
- Procedural injustice: Communities have a weak voice in decision-making about resilience strategies, including design of projects and programmes. ‘Consultation’ processes are token and do not meaningfully engage diverse vulnerable groups and provide spaces for them to effectively express their needs and ideas.
- Restorative injustice: Insufficient support is provided by those causing climate change, both historic and current emitters, to address the risks and harms imposed on vulnerable people.
- Retributive justice: Those responsible for causing risks are not being held to account. Legacies and ongoing impacts of colonialism, imperialism and predatory capitalist systems are causing interlinked violences and oppressions.
- Justice in system outcomes: Climate change is causing damage to the natural and cultural heritage of communities, especially for those dependent on nature for their livelihoods and Indigenous Peoples.
- Intergenerational injustice: Future generations lose opportunities to use natural ecosystems for their livelihoods or cultural values. The identity of Indigenous youth and ways of life in rural communities are threatened.
How can we address climate injustice?
One approach to addressing climate justice focuses on ‘capabilities’ as people must have the freedom, opportunities and agency to pursue and achieve the well-being they value and the lives they design for themselves. Climate justice can, therefore, be understood as the guarantee of restoring individual freedoms and opportunities affected by climate change, including economic, social, and political freedoms, and enabling expression of individual and collective political agency.
It follows that putting climate justice at the centre in NbS must focus on restoring individual freedoms and opportunities for local and Indigenous communities to, firstly, engage meaningfully in decision-making about management of these resources and, secondly, to protect benefits from natural ecosystems which support their livelihoods, well-being, culture and way of life. This requires addressing power imbalances and exclusions which underly injustice and inequity.
With this understanding, CANARI’s work suggests seven recommendations for practical application of a justice-centred approach to NbS:
- Communities must have the ability to meaningfully participate in decision-making processes around the development and implementation of NbS initiatives. Just NbS doesn’t simply ‘involve’ or ‘benefit’ marginalised communities and vulnerable groups but rather ensures that they are involved in designing and delivering the NbS initiatives. We need to invest in meaningful engagement with the diversity of community stakeholders to ensure that their short and long-term needs and concerns are being heard and will be addressed. We also need to conduct rigorous stakeholder analysis and targeted engagement to address special vulnerabilities of intersectional identities, focus on deep listening, and use local mobilisers and counterparts. We must support strengthening of local organisations and include their voice in decision-making as well as facilitate processes which address power imbalances and build trust.
- Communities’ local concerns must be respected and included in design of NbS initiatives and ensure transparency and accountability in how these are addressed. We need to pay genuine attention to community needs and ideas in project design and reporting. We must design initiatives which are community-centric and led or co-led by local and Indigenous communities, with community representatives as members of decision-making structures. This requires us to understand and address where intersectional oppressions and marginalisations (for example related to Indigeneity, poverty, gender, age, education, political affiliation) interact to amplify vulnerabilities and exclusion. We must also be mindful of factors such as lack of free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) for Indigenous or local groups, and one-size-fits-all approaches that ignore cultural differences.
- For locally led NbS, communities must be supported to do their own assessment of risks at the local level and to develop their own strategies for resilience building. We need to use participatory tools and approaches, for example ICTs such as drones and GIS mapping, to support communities to document and assess risks they face and their priorities for resilience. We must respect and draw on communities’ local and Indigenous knowledge, integrating this with scientific knowledge for enhanced effectiveness. We should also provide space and support for communities to pursue self-determined approaches to resilience and development.
- Communities must have access to resources to enable them to drive their own resilience building. Just NbS requires explicit recognition of the ways in which access to and control over resources (particularly the land and spaces used for NbS) determine economic, environmental, and social outcomes. Therefore, we need to secure political and policy support to give communities access to land and other permissions and resources they need to restore and protect natural ecosystems important to their resilience. We must also channel finance to communities at the local level to support locally led actions, and commit to long-term flexible financing and support.
- Communities must have access to the best technical and scientific support to complement their local and Indigenous knowledge. We need to foster partnerships with communities which can provide external technical support via coaching and mentoring, which respects and responds to community needs and ensures NbS design is technically sound, including to avoid maladaptation and unjust redistribution of risks and costs.
- Consider long-term risk and development needs of communities. Climate change impacts increase exposure of local and Indigenous communities to multiple natural hazards such as hurricanes and drought, but also amplify other risks for example from environmental degradation and economic shocks due to global disruptions. We need to support communities to assess long term risk and encourage flexibility and adaptive approaches for multi-hazard resilience and sustainability.
- Respect the perspectives of communities on NbS and don’t assume it is always the most appropriate or meaningful approach. NbS is quite a scientific term and is contested among some Indigenous communities who value nature intrinsically rather than as a solution to other problems. It is important, therefore, to take into account local understandings of the concept and how the value of nature is understood or experienced by different groups, rather than impose externally derived models and approaches.
Just NbS are community-centric and ensure that human rights are protected. Just NbS contribute to human well-being, rather than maintain or worsen inequities and injustices which these communities are already facing, and which hinder their ability to build their resilience to climate change and other threats. In conclusion, to achieve resilience at the local level in the Caribbean, we must ensure that NbS put justice and equity issues at the centre.